The University of Arizona Press
May 27, 2026
Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, gave the invocation to start the Tucson City Council Meeting on May 19, 2026. Phillips is Tucson Poet Laureate and a cultural worker based in Tucson (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). The poem he read, “Notes Toward a Poem for the Land,” was written at the request of some of the elders involved in organizing with Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition (TBOSC). Watch and listen to the invocation here:
Thank you for sharing your new poem, Logan!
About Logan Phillips’ recently published hybrid memoir, Reckon:
What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona?
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
